Warframe: Beyond the Tools of War
by The Hussar
Summary: The lore of Warframe says that we find parts of Warframes from bosses because that's where and how they died. I wanted to play with this theme and give something of a deeper look into just what happened to the 'original' Warframes. This is really the only tidbit of lore I'm taking into account and I have no idea how it might turn out, but there's only one way we'll know for sure...
1. Prologue - The Chronicler

In my long existence, I have gone by a great deal many names. Here in the Relays, most call me the Chronicler.

In the twilight of my life, my responsibilities lie mostly in maintaining the archives of the Tenno and, in extreme circumstances, of the Syndicates.

Before my inevitable passing, I had hoped to pass onto you a unique knowledge, the stories of the original Warframes and of how their owners met their doom.

As the Chronicler of the Relays, one of my duties has been to maintain the original Warframes in order for them to serve as 'master templates' of sorts for all the Tenno. In all this time however, no one has ever wanted to know just who the Tenno who first possessed these Warframes were and how their lives ended.

I'll let you in on a secret.

Your Warframe records everything. Not just your vitals, mental state and probability of survival but also everything that you see and do. It's hardwired into every frame, so that Chroniclers like myself can go through all that you've seen before your untimely end and compile your…Well, chronicle.

Allow me to caution you. Not every death you will read of here has been honourable or painless. Tenno may live by a code of honour but any creature that would see a Tenno dead would have abandoned their own honour long ago. You've no doubt heard tales and folklore about the Tenno who died peacefully on the field of battle, bleeding out in the arms of their friends…

This life, this world, the Origin System…It's no tale. Black and white are alien concepts in this reality and every story is a beam of light passing through a prism…You have been warned. If it's knowledge, or even closure that you seek, you'll doubtless find it here. But if you come here with a closed mind and open eyes then you're only seeking lies.

We shall start with Ember, and learn about how her flame came to fade.


	2. File 1 - Ember

_Don't let her name fool you, Tenno. Ember was colder than ice on the battlefield. She often used the flames powered by her Warframe to completely incinerate those that she killed, just to make sure no one ever found a trace of her deeds._

 _The circumstances of her death were a surprise to many of us, even the Lotus._

 _She met her end on the Tethys Outpost of Saturn, and that's where we'll start…_

* * *

The _Liset_ hummed peacefully, suspended in the orbit of Saturn. Methodically, Ember went through every one of the ship's systems to ensure that everything was in working order. She found that this was always the longest part of any mission she undertook. As far as she could see, getting in and out were always the hardest parts of breaking into any Grineer facility. Going through one was the easy part.

She studied the plans for Tethys time and time again and she was perfectly capable of reciting the security codes for every set of doors from memory…Yet there was something wrong. There had been since she decided she was ready to assassinate Sargas Ruk, but now it seemed even more apparent. There was no indication, no hint but she felt it with every inch of her being.

It was time. She couldn't risk taking the _Liset_ too close to the outpost because the ship's heat signature would give everything away. The plan was relatively simple. The ship would begin to drift towards Tethys (still cloaked) and she would eject herself from it while the distance between her and Tethys was no more, no less than 3 kilometres. She would be without oxygen for a little over ten seconds while she approached the refuse disposal airlock.

The engines flared up.

She couldn't foresee a need to use anything other than a _Dakra_ for this mission, but the nagging feeling of something going wrong would not escape her, so she strapped a _Latron_ rifle to her back for peace of mind.

6 Kilometres.

One final look through the plans. She had memorised the patrol routes of each and every guard on Tethys, there was too much at stake for a single error here. Perhaps it was the promise that she made to the Lotus that had made her feel uneasy. She hated making promises, but this one in particular she was afraid of braking.

5 Kilometres.

"He'll suffer" Ember spoke. "After Gradivus, after…Everything. You have my word." The Lotus discouraged her. Told her to drop the assignment and focus on something else. But that was out of the question for her.

4 Kilometres.

It was a burning passion. Something the Tenno were told not to ever feel. It ruined them, made them careless. But Ember used it to perfect herself. The burns she suffered from when she first met Sargas Ruk had healed quicker than anyone could ever expect. Every healer on the Relays thought they'd have to tear chunks of her Warframe off of her along with melted flesh when she first returned, but no such thing happened. She rested, trained, healed...And now…

3 Kilometres.

The device to which she was attached flipped outwards from the _Liset_ and she was dropped while the ship made a sudden turn upwards and away from Tethys. Ember ignored the vital warnings that her visor displayed and focused instead on the airlock for which she was aiming. She had timed the entire mission to the second, and unless the Grineer made any last minute changes then the air lock would open…Now.

A warm light and cubes of crushed metal met her as she deployed a set of weak thrusters to propel herself into the airlock. When the enormous doors finally closed, she landed gracefully on her feet as the gravity generators began to power the room once again.

That was the hard part, she told herself.

A brisk stride to the left of the refuse disposal and she found the vent that she was looking for. A brief spark from her hands was all it took to melt the metal around the edges and remove it from its screws.

Dust flecked on the visor of her Warframe as she crawled through the ventilation system. She stopped dead in her tracks when she came to a vent mounted onto the bottom side of the shaft.

 _Clunk_

 _Clunk_

 _Clunk_

The guard was gone. He wouldn't make this pass for another 4 minutes.

She continued onwards, determined and confident but constantly looking for anything that might be even slightly out of place, anything that she missed or ignored. She sparked another vent that led into a long, empty corridor but made sure to replace it when she crawled out. The corridor she found herself in was filled with a soft buzzing noise that Ember quickly identified as a sensor bar on one of the doors, completely expected.

Grineer systems may have been relatively advanced, but their designs were flawed in certain areas. The sensor bars did their job but they only took into account one creature passing through the door, no more. Even better, the system placed priority on the authorized creature rather than an unauthorized one, meaning that if a Grineer and a Tenno were to pass through the door at the same time…

Three sensor bars she bypassed this way before she stopped dead in her tracks again. She was ahead of time. Three, two, one and…

 _Clunk_

 _Clunk_

 _Clunk_

A guard walked on the floor above her and would not make that same pass for another 2 minutes. She was in synch again.

Despite her healing so well after she first encountered Sargas Ruk, Ember was still left heavily disfigured on the inside. Her lungs, liver and kidneys simply shut down, and her heart has never quite stopped beating irregularly since that day (even with help from the various life support systems of her Warframe). Really, the only visible 'scar' she bore from that incident was her long, red hair which now only grew on one side of her head.

It wasn't what Sargas Ruk had done to her that drove her to revenge, not really. It was the nonchalance, the lack of feeling or interest with which he did it that burned itself into her memory. She was almost offended by it…

 _Thud_

The Grineer Lancer slumped onto the floor, choking on his blood. The Tenno kneeled beside him and placed her hands on his back. It only took a few seconds for the corpse to turn into ash which gently flew towards the ventilation system.

Cameras. Ember had never seen a camera on any Grineer facility, not even the most secure ones. Even here on Tethys, where Sargas Ruk had been residing for the better part of the last year there wasn't a single camera. It made her trek through the facility marginally easier, since she wasn't forced to memorise their movement patterns, but it was a curiosity nonetheless.

"Tenno, it's not too late to abandon your mission. You can be extracted." The Lotus' voice startled her somewhat, but she did not answer. She certainly didn't like the Lotus doubting her. It added to her uneasiness, but she told herself there was nothing to worry about, that it wasn't doubt but simply the Lotus caring for her Tenno, nothing more. It was a beautiful lie.

There was one aspect of her mission that Ember did not plan for. She didn't know how she would make Sargas Ruk suffer. She knew _ways_ of making him suffer, but wanted to leave it as a surprise to even herself when she drew up the plans for the mission. Tenno were supposed to cut down their enemies swiftly and honourably, but Ember saw no honour in what was done to her.

Another spark and she was climbing up a ventilation shaft on the ceiling. She made sure to replace this one too, as awkward as it was, and continued climbing upwards. A voice somewhere in the distance blared out of a loudspeaker and yelled something about the Queens and how work gave the Grineer freedom. Ember ignored it.

She was 200 metres from the room in which Sargas Ruk was supposed to be, or rather she was right next to the room where Sargas Ruk was supposed to be but this particular ventilation shaft was designed in such a way that it snaked around the room and opened up on a catwalk near the ceiling. Ember sighed, wheezing ever so slightly through her lungs and continued onwards.

For a time, she simply considered blowing up Tethys. Studying the plans for the outpost showed her that the asteroid it was built on housed huge deposits of methane, which the Grineer extracted on a minor scale. Her Warframe would have allowed her to simply ignite all of that methane and kill everything and everyone on Tethys…Including herself.

That particular thought didn't last long. She realised that she had to stop feeling sorry for herself. Tenno had suffered worse fates than her and didn't even live to see another day, she was lucky. There was also the potential of Orokin artefacts existing inside the outpost, and she understood rather well just how valuable those were not just to the Lotus but to the Tenno as a whole.

Ember felt almost relieved when she started to hear a loud banging coming from the room nearby. She knew perfectly well it was Sargas Ruk, walking around in his augmented body. Doubt began to fade from her mind.

That was the mistake.

The final vent sparked and Ember carefully lowered it onto the catwalk below her. She wasn't sure if the loud banging stopped as she sparked the vent or when she was already on the catwalk, but it certainly didn't register until a pillar of flame burst out from below the catwalk and liquefied the metal.

Regaining her composure was relatively easy as she sailed through the air. She quickly adjusted herself and landed with as much grace as she could muster at that particular moment in time. The Dakra she brought with her was already unsheathed by the time she hit the ground, and she braced herself for gunfire…

But none came.

Just for a moment, she thought that maybe she had somehow hallucinated the whole thing, imagined it. But alas, the catwalk was still melted and the soot on her Warframe was as real as anything else was. Then the clicking started.

She counted forty-five Grineer troopers, all emerging from behind various walls and makeshift pieces of cover, all aiming and cocking their weapons at her. Sargas Ruk followed suit just behind them.

It was difficult for her to comprehend how she could have gotten herself into this situation. She was sure no one saw her, because she always made sure she left no evidence behind, and Grineer bases never had any sort of cameras installed, even hidden ones…

Weighing up her options didn't make the situation easier. She could easily close the distance to a group of troopers, but she'd take out six or seven before they shredded her Warframe, and that's ignoring what Sargas Ruk would do.

There was another way…

A thick cloud of smoke exploded from where Ember stood and the Grineer began to fire wildly in that general direction. One by one they dropped dead or got hurled backwards by a flaming projectile. Eventually the smoke subsided, and only Ember and Sargas Ruk stood exactly where they had stood before.

"Mercenary…" The Grineer began. "You come to try and take my life one more time?" His laugh was mechanical. Distorted. Ember realised this wasn't just because of how horribly deformed he was from the multitude of augmentations he had installed, but also because her own Warframe didn't have enough energy to process the audio coming from outside of it. Her stunt was effective but it meant that she had depleted near enough all of the Warframe's power.

"I let your Lotus buy your life the last time you came to me, you won't get this privilege again." Ember charged at him. She knew that she'd have to disable Ruk soon or her Warframe would start to malfunction.

"You Tenno are all too predictable." Sargas Ruk simply stood there as Ember ran at him with her sword and just as soon as she was leaping towards him, his mechanical arm met her blade and grasped it.

Ember gasped inaudibly as the Dakra turned into brittle fragments of metal.

She saw it then, and almost felt…Cheated. Sargas Ruk's augmented eye. The cyclopean receptor saw her as soon as she made it into the facility. Why would you need cameras across an entire facility when you can have one that sees through _walls_?

Ember sparked in the general direction of the Grineer and created some distance between them. She readied her Latron and was about to shoot when a blast of heat sent her flying into a reinforced glass window, knocking the air out of her lungs and her helmet off her head.

For the second time in her life, she felt humiliated. She was never one to care about pride, or even honour, but she had also rarely experienced weakness on such a scale. As she lay there gasping for air, she realised what was coming and refused to accept it.

Sargas Ruk _thudded_ over toward her and looked down with that singular eye of his.

"The Lotus ought to train her children better. It's dangerous to play with fire little Tenno." He bent over and picked her up, gently. For a moment, a split second, she felt relief. A flash of calming warmth went through her, then the horrifying realisation.

Her Warframe began to spark and crack as it melted from underneath her, and the flesh of her back and her legs felt as though it was being peeled right off of her. For the first and the last time in her life she screamed, not in pain or in agony, but in sheer terror.

* * *

I honestly didn't want to have to include an Author's Note in the first _proper_ chapter of this fic, but I realised only towards the end of writing this that Tethys isn't actually on the Grineer Asteroid tileset. I'll have to take some artistic license with this even though I mentioned before that I'm following the lore of Warframe very, very loosely, but I'd rather you guys knew I'm aware of that particular mistake. Whoops. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing this too, I'm trying to tackle Warframe in a slightly grittier and (somewhat) realistic kind of way, and I honestly have no idea how it's going to work out in the long run. Thanks for reading!


	3. File 2 - Nyx

_Nyx earned her fame through her unparalleled ability to manipulate her enemies on the battlefield. She was one of the very few natural born psychics who amplified their powers through the Warframe technology._

 _While we know the circumstances of her death, we've never quite been able to trace exactly where the pieces of her Warframe were found, though this is unsurprising given the nature of the enemy that she faced..._

* * *

 _They were scared of her. All of them._

 _They never told her, of course. But then again they didn't need to. She didn't need to read minds to pick up on the obvious body language of the people she spoke to._

 _When she was growing up, everyone around her called it a gift. The ability to read, influence and even destroy minds by using her own. But she could never see it that way._

 _Everyone she met and grew close to gradually mistrusted and feared her, not because of the things she had done but because of the things she could do, that was the part that hurt her the most and it hurt her right until her dying breath._

 _She found some peace among the Tenno. They taught her to appreciate her powers but never to underestimate them, and she proved herself more than worthy countless times during various sabotage raids on Corpus treasure ships._

 _Despite the love and camaraderie of the Tenno, Nyx almost always found herself afraid and in doubt of herself. The many years she spent growing up with people afraid of her made her afraid of the things she was capable of._

She blasted the crawling mass of flesh away with a mere thought, sending it crashing into the rocky wall of the asteroid. Signing up for this particular mission seemed so simple to her just a few days ago. Dealing with the infestation felt like second nature to her, and yet now she found herself overwhelmed by the sheer number of the mysterious creatures.

Screeching echoed not only through the rock but also deep within her mind. The Lotus had explained it to her once, that the infestation communicated as a hive mind through a vast neural network, and that her unique genetic make up allowed her to tap into this network, but no matter how hard she tried she could never truly understand it.

It was different this time, as if there was some theme or pattern to the screeches, one low pitched screech followed by a salvo of high pitched screeches. It was different, and it made her uneasy, but she continued.

 _Ash was the only Tenno she could truly call a friend during her training in the dojo, primarily because everyone seemed to distrust him as much as they distrusted her, and that drove them awfully close._

 _When she was sent from the Relays to the dojo, Ash was already equipped with a Warframe of his own and given a Liset. She'd often ask him to take her with him on one of his missions, but they both knew that their particular clan viewed this as not only an interruption of her training, but also desertion, both of which were punishable by death._

 _Rules like these seemed unfair to her at first, but the many nights she spent in the archives studying other clans quickly made her realise that death was seen as the kindest treatment of Tenno who abandoned their clan. She read about clans that would torture, imprison and even lobotomised unruly students for breaking rules much less serious than the ones she had once wanted to break._

 _Despite this, she respected the Tenno. They were the only family she had, especially after her own birth parents had disowned her._

Skittering. She could hear skittering. The infested don't skitter, or so she told herself.

Thump.

The grenade from her Tonkor sailed gracefully into the ventilation shaft beside her, there was a brief pause in the skittering before a cloud of smoke and pus was sent flying out of the vent. Blood had never bothered Nyx, but the sheer toxicity of infested guts made her want to hurl.

A disgusted smirk appeared beneath the helmet of her Warframe, as she remembered how opposed she was to the idea of bringing a grenade launcher on what was supposed to be a simple clean up mission.

She loaded up a hologram of the asteroid mining facility's layout on the inner visor of her Warframe. Since the start of the mission she cleared two hives and locked down the lower levels of the facility, which meant that she still had to clear out another hive and find the 'core' of the infestation.

Cores were a relatively recent phenomena on clean up missions, which suggested to her and the rest of the Tenno that the infested were actively adapting to their strategies, but thus far it only served to elongate the clean up missions, it hadn't really made them any more or less difficult.

 _"We're doing what's best for you." Her mother said, "You'll understand this one day."_

 _Unwanted by strangers, unwanted by friends and now also unwanted by her own family. Nyx wept as she was dragged aboard the Liset. As the years went on, she learned that her mother was right and she did indeed understand why her parents had to give her away to the Tenno, but she could never forgive them._

 _When she was finally free to leave the Dojo, Ash had urged her to find her parents and re-conciliate with them but nothing he said could change her mind. Her family had disowned her and, in her mind, she disowned them. The Tenno were her family for the majority of her life and they showed her more love than her birth parents ever did, at least from her point of view._

Blood and pus sprayed from the now-decapitated Charger as Nyx made her way further up the facility. She found herself being plagued by memories that had no place or reason to come up during a routine mission. She wasn't in danger, she wasn't worried. In fact, aside from the ever present urge to throw up she felt rather well. Yet still, she couldn't shake seeing the people that had once been a part of her life, people that she would much rather forget than keep locked away in her mind.

Shrieks, screeches and wails surrounded her once again as a group of Ancients tore their way out of a medical bay. Ancients, she found, were really only difficult to deal with on their own. They were resilient, dangerous and hulking masses of flesh, but in a group they did significantly more harm to themselves than they ever did to her.

A quick flick of her wrist at the significantly more toxic Ancient in the group turned it into her temporary ally. Clouds of poisonous gas filled the air around her, sending the other Ancients into a frenzy while she surrounded herself with a forcefield bubble.

 _The bubble burst as Ash jumped up from behind her. She had asked him to help her train her concentration but so far it was proving a fruitless endeavour._

 _Ash laughed. "How do you keep messing this up if you know I'm going to scare you? Try it again."_

 _"I know you will scare me, I just don't know WHEN, that's the part that gets me you dummy." Nyx frowned and produced another bubble. She was 11 now and expected to use her own initiative while training. The Tenno were excellent teachers primarily because they encouraged their young to hone their strengths and eliminate their weaknesses. Nyx worked on both aspects heartily every day without a break._

The cloud dissipated and Nyx emerged from her bubble. In their frenzy, the Ancients beat themselves into disgusting piles of organic matters that barely resembled what they were just minutes ago. She continued onwards.

Dealing with hives was significantly easier with a heavily modified grenade launcher, Nyx found. Her Tonkor propelled grenades at such a velocity that they could pierce through several layers of organic material, much like a bullet. This meant that destroying the centre of the hive was as simple as pointing and shooting in its general direction, then having to deal with the flood of chargers and crawlers that would pour out of it.

Thump.

The grenade pierced the fleshy exterior of the hive and exploded in a mass of flesh after a quick series of beeps. Nyx had readied herself for the oncoming onslaught of infested creatures...But none came.

Instead, the skittering started once again.

 _When she wasn't training or hounding her masters for information, Nyx spent a lot of time in the archives. Her thirst for knowledge was unending and she often had to be forced outside so she could actually get some sleep at night. She always told herself that once he training was over and she completed her duties for the Tenno, she would return to the Relays and become a Chronicler._

 _This was a dream she never entirely understood but somewhere in the back of her mind she knew that this was something she had to do. Her abilities let her memorise and learn things much faster than most Tenno and this fact would have made her invaluable when collecting and writing entries for the archives._

 _Ash mocked her at first when she confided in him, but when her 15th birthday came around she was shocked when he claimed that he arranged for the current Chronicler to visit her in the Dojo and speak to her. At first she thought he was playing some kind of prank on her but when a Liset with the mark of the Relays on its hull arrived at the Dojo, Nyx could not have been happier._

Hundreds, no, thousands of tiny infested bugs poured out from where the Hive stood mere moments ago. Nyx was quick to think on her feet but this was an eventuality she did not come prepared for. She fired off two grenades in the direction of the swarm and found that her Tonkor was now empty. This was bad.

A few of the creatures pounced onto her Warframe and headed straight for the joints connecting the various limbs together. Nyx gasped when she realised what was happening. The creatures knew exactly where the weak points of her Warframe were, and they aimed to exploit them. She shook them off but not before the gauntlet of her exoskeleton fell to the ground with a metallic clang. This was worse.

She saw it then, a hulking pod from which the tiny creatures kept jumping out of. It was almost like another hive, except this one could walk...

Deep breath.

Close your eyes.

Nyx got herself clear of the creatures and sat cross legged on the rocky floor. This was dangerous, even more so since her Warframe was compromised, but she had no other choice. Another bubble formed around her and the tiny beings all began charging and leaping towards her, only to get suspended in mid air the moment they made contact with the bubble.

She had only practised this technique with bullets, but with a bit of extra energy...

The miniature swarm was sent flying in near enough three hundred and sixty different directions. Several of them even pierced the walking, breathing, breeding pod which now began to emit a pained howl that struck Nyx as a cry for help.

 _"You have great potential to become a Chronicler, child." The old man spoke. "One of the very first Chroniclers on the Relays was a psychic you know." Nyx simply sat and listened to the man speak with her jaw ready to crash to the floor. "Have you nothing to say?"_

 _She smiled. She rarely did so but right now she just couldn't help herself._

 _"I don't know what to say, truly. If I could I'd leave for the Relays right now." The Chronicler chuckled but gave her a stern look._

 _"All Chroniclers begin their work at the twilight of their lives, child. You must come to the archives not just with a dream, or a passion, but with experiences. Honour the Tenno, help this forsaken system, then you can take your place in the Relay archives." He smiled and Nyx nodded. She hated waiting, but this wasn't something that she could take lightly, she understood that now and she couldn't be happier._

Nyx woke up. She was out for two minutes and would likely have been unconscious much longer if it wasn't for the fact that the ground beneath her was shaking violently. The sheer effort required to produce a bubble strong enough to stop and then launch all those creatures must have worn her out completely, and she struggled to maintain her balance.

Something was different, she noticed. It wasn't just the fact that she had an encounter with an undocumented infested, or the fact that the asteroid she was on appeared to be quaking, but the background shrieking of the infested seemed to have changed too.

She could no longer hear the high pitched shrieks, only the dull but power low pitched shriek that seemed to be getting not only louder and louder but also faster in tempo. She wanted to congratulate herself on being right about the walking pod crying for help, but the immediate need to formulate a plan took precedence over that fact.

The rock wall behind her burst outwards and she saved herself from being struck by a feldspar boulder with a quick motion of her hands. She no longer needed to listen to the shrieking in her mind, as the source stood right there and then.

Her first thought was that it was simply another charger, but that could not have been the case. This was a ten foot tall quadruped that looked like someone had fused several different types of organic matter together and decided to give it life. It terrified her.

Phorid ran at her with a speed she was not prepared for. She attempted to dodge the creature but accidentally clipped one of its deformed legs, sending her flying into a nearby storage locker. Before she could regain her balance, Phorid was charging at her once again. Nyx blasted the creature with a psychic wave which only served to push its front legs under its carcass, sending it skidding.

Nyx was rapidly running out of options. Her Tonkor was empty, and her melee weapon nowhere to be found. She could only do so much with her psychic abilities in her current state but running was not an option right now.

As Phorid got back up, Nyx braced herself for another charge, but it never came. Instead, the creature shrieked once again and launched some form of projectile from its back. She mustered the strength to produce another forcefield but it proved fruitless. The bubble popped.

Two shards deflected off of her Warframe, but a third struck her directly in her exposed wrist, impaling her.

To Nyx's surprise, Phorid fell silent, and turned around. The hulking beast ignored her and began to undulate back towards where it had burst through the wall.

Her arm hurt, a lot. In fact, she could see every single vein in her arm pulsating with green pus. She suddenly found that she didn't know what to do with herself. She was panicking. Her mind raced from deciding whether to pull out the strange shard lodged in her wrist to trying to get back to her Liset as fast as possible, her indecision was met with her crashing to her knees and trying to clutch her chest with her one working arm.

Breathing became very, very difficult. The Warframe began to inject respiratory liquid into her system but it made little difference. Necrosis. That's what was happening. It was a poignant realisation, and one she wished she didn't make in her last moments. Nyx tried to scream, but only pained gargling could be heard.

* * *

Woah I actually wrote something. I realise this took a lot longer than it should have an I apologise, especially to those of you who have decided to follow and favourite the story. I've used a slightly different format with this chapter and it's not one that I'm going to use for every entry, but it's quite nice for trying to tell more personal stories for the Warframes.


End file.
